Beating the Beta :)

From the time I found out that I had the opportunity to shift to Blogger beta (not a great opportunity as such - if you have a gmail id you can shift :-p), I've been thinking about doing it. After all, I've wanted labels (or tags) for my posts for what seems forever. So much that I've thought about going for a third-party service for the same. I just never got around to doing it as it was a bit tedious. When I found out Blogger beta has them, I was really excited. But there were some problems and I had to fix them before I could "upgrade" :-D.

The first thing was the template of this blog. Nope, I was not going to change the template again. I am very happy with the current template and am going to stick to it for a long time (well, until I come up with a better one :-D). But I was worried that shifting might screw up something that was screwed up already. So I did change some of the template code, to fix the resolution issue. If you note the note in the right pane you can see "This blog is best viewed in IE 6.0, Netscape 7.2 or Mozilla 1.5.0.6 with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels or higher." Yeah I fixed the problems and certified it in latest versions of IE, Netscape and Mozilla :)). The template was adapting to any resolution equal to or greater than 1024 x 768 pixels (optimum is when equal to) :)).

The next thing was that the known issues of blogger beta said that "Users who have switched to Blogger in beta will not be able to login to comment on blogs that have not switched" and also that "Users are seeing errors when posting comments with current Blogger accounts to blogs on the new version of Blogger in beta". So the 1st meant that I wouldn't be able to comment on other blogs who have not yet shifted to beta. That is still ok as I would be able to comment as anonymous or other. But the 2nd was a bigger problem as I don't have anonymous comments enabled. So others who comment (hardly comment ;-) :-D), won't be able to comment at all. The updates tell me that both issues are fixed. Even if there are problems, there is a workaround. What needs to be done is after typing the comment, click Preview button. Then click the "Publish the comment" link on the preview box and not the button on the leave your comment window :).

The third thing was that the shifting couldn't be undone. That is, once I shifted to Blogger beta, if something went wrong with the template, there was no way I could get back to normal blogger and continue normally. Naturally, I was a bit apprehensive. But after shifting, I found that I could keep my old template, but couldn't really take advantage of the new features of the beta in that case. The changes I had done previously to my template (for fixing it for higher resolutions) felt like a total waste of time. God!! I had to upgrade to a new template and modify it again to suit my template. Needless to say, it was a really tedious job, it took more than 5 hours yesterday. I had to fix every bit of code to make it look and work like it was doing previously. I again had to check the browser compatibility and make modifications + the resolutions too. Phew, finally I've brought the whole thing to a stage where I can say I'm happy with it. It still needs some modifications, mainly I have too many labels and I need a different format for them, but those are all negligible :). And I'm gonna take my own sweet time with those :).

So that was it. As of yesterday I have been in Blogger beta. I have already started labelling the posts (I don't have many anyways ;-) :-D) and am done with most :).

Before I sign off, a couple of quick updates on some of my previous posts:

1) James Polehinke, the lone survivor and the co-pilot of the Comair flight crash I posted on, is alive. But the poor guy had to have his leg amputated and still has many fractures (update here). It seems he doesn't even remember the crash..

2) Well, Popeye, Sri and me can eat spinach again after the no-spinach-days which I posted on. The US-wide ban on spinach has been lifted (update here).